At the present time, the telecommunications services offered to consumers are diversifying and the number of service providers that provide them is increasing. The service providers are as varied as the types of service, from support network services such as collection services to application services such as video on demand (VoD) services, for example. A division has arisen between network service providers and providers of application services accessible via those networks.
Each service provider manages information on its own clients. Some information or data is “static” in that its value is fixed at the time of subscribing to or modifying the service; other information is “dynamic” in that it has a value, or even exists, only during a session using the service (e.g. a network access address). Of this dynamic information, some information is more dynamic than other information and may change during the same session (e.g. the user location). Some applications need to take account of information that sometimes relates to different services offered by any service providers, which are sometimes different from the provider that provides said application.
Examples that may be mentioned include the provision of global user location-information, potentially via all access networks to all operators, and the provision of user presence information, potentially on all access networks.
For the above reasons, a new type of provider that is operative between network service providers and/or application service providers has recently come into being: these mediation service providers, which are also known as generic service providers, offer telecommunications services.
The invention stems from the concern to enable a generic service provider, also known as a mediation service provider, to recover dynamic information easily and efficiently from service providers and to notify the corresponding events to other service providers that subscribe to this kind of multidomain multiprovider mediation. The term “multidomain” is used when the service providers that subscribe to the notification service do not all belong to the same commercial entity, for example the same telephone operator. Setting up this system gives additional added value to the mediation service provider.
At present there are two types of system for recovery by an application of user information stored by other services.
In a first type of system, the demanding application and the services holding the information are offered by the same service provider. In this case, the application is of less complex design because the various equipments and interfaces for obtaining the information are known. In some cases, the application may even need to interface only with one unit pooling information for all the services of the same service provider. However, information notification is not always supported directly.
In a second type of system, the enquiring application is supported by a service provider and the services holding the useful information are supported by other service providers unknown to the first. In this situation, one solution is to use the services of a user profile provider able to pool information linked to services supported by multiple providers. However, not all the required information is necessarily held by the profile provider and, more importantly, it is necessary to “retrieve” the information, as there is no associated notification service.
The above systems have the following disadvantages.
If the system is limited to recovering information from only one or a few given service providers, it has access only to information on a subset of services potentially accessible by a user.
If access to information on potentially all service providers is available via a single user profile provider, the application must retrieve the wanted information itself. Because of the very large volume of data concerned, it is typically necessary to use a polling system that is unwieldy and in some cases unsuitable.
Generally speaking, the application is often faced with a complex design resulting from the distributed nature of the units to be accessed and the heterogeneous nature or the absence of interfaces to be supported.